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Margaret Cool Root

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Name given to a people of Persian origin, who founded an empire that flourished c. 550–331 bc.

The Achaemenid Persian empire was founded c. 550 bc by Cyrus the Great. At its greatest extent under Darius the Great (reg 522–486 bc), it stretched from the Indus into northern Greece and across Egypt. The Macedonian Alexander the Great (...

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The Achilles Painter is named for his depictions of Achilles, particularly that on an amphora in the Vatican where the hero is shown armed with a lance and wearing a cuirass. He is depicted standing alone, while on the other side of the amphora is a female figure. This way of presenting single figures, one on either side of a vase, can be compared to the work of the Berlin Painter and initially had a very strong influence on the Achilles Painter. The rather exaggerated anatomical details of the early nudes is borrowed from the Berlin Painter....

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Marco Rendeli

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Modern name of an Etruscan settlement near Viterbo, Italy. It is situated on a small tufa plateau bounded on three sides by streams, one of which runs red. Excavations conducted by the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies during the 1960s and 1970s uncovered the tufa foundations of buildings that comprised various sectors of an ancient town. These provide some of the most extensive archaeological evidence relating to Etruscan domestic architecture and urban organization. The site was already inhabited in the ...

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David S. Brose

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Prehistoric site in North America. It is the largest of several mounds along the Scioto River north of Chillicothe, OH. Although it is the eponym of the Early Woodland-period Adena culture of the Upper Ohio River Valley (c. 1000–c. 100 bc), the date of the mound itself is unknown. No stylized engraved palettes, characteristic of Adena culture, were found. The mound comprises a penannular earthwork built in several stages to a height of 8 m. A circular structure with sloping sides and double-set wooden post walls was constructed on a floor from which numerous fires had been cleared. Next, burials were placed centrally in rectangular tombs dug into the floor of the structure, a low mound was heaped over them and the funerary structure was burned. The entire area was then covered by layers of black sand incorporating several new cremations and burials outside the central tombs. For some considerable time after this, additional cremated human remains and extended burials were placed in further layers of sand and gravel. The cremation and inhumation burials, and occasionally clay-covered bundles of bones, were accompanied by annular and penannular copper bracelets and rings; cut river mussel shell animal effigies; cut mica headbands; expanded centre gorgets, ground, polished and drilled, of schist and chlorite; and a human effigy carved in the round on an Ohio pipestone tube....

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Probably Ionian, Aetion was active in the second half of the 4th century BC. Lucian describes one of his paintings representing the Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, princess of Sogdiana. The Aldobrandini frescoes may relate to this work. Lucian's text inspired Sodoma (or Raphael ?) to paint the same subject. According to Pliny, who indicates that the artist also worked in bronze, Aetion also painted an ...

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C. Hobey-Hamsher

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Greek painter. Pliny (Natural History, XXXV.78) placed Aetion in the 107th Olympiad (352–349 bc) and (XXXV.50) included him in a list of painters who used a palette restricted to four colours: white, yellow, red and black. Cicero (Brutus xviii.70), however, listed him among those painters who used a wider palette. It is likely that the four-colour palette was a restriction adopted occasionally by many artists who, in other works, used more than four colours. None of Aetion’s work survives, but Pliny ascribed to him pictures of ...

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C. Hobey-Hamsher

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Greek painter. He was the son of Eudemos and came originally from Samos, but worked in Athens; none of his work survives. He was said to be self-taught. Vitruvius (On Architecture VII.praef.11) claimed that Agatharchos was the first artist to paint a stage set on wooden panels. This was for a tragedy by ...

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Agatharchus was a Samian painter working in Athens in the second half of the 5th century BC, at the time of Pericles. He is thought to have painted a skene (backdrop) for Aeschylus' play Seven against Thebes...

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The pyxis (small pot) signed by Agathon shows a scene of offering that, from the names of the figures, must be taking place on Olympus. The style is still 'severe', though it is freer than that on the Megacles pyxis. Stylistically, it can be dated to around 450 BC....